Zesko Rolls

Monday, February 20, 2012

THE MIRACULOUS: FACT AND FAKERY

I want to talk about The Miraculous.

We know that Creation is a miracle. Don't we? It's an ongoing miracle, it's still happening, it embraces us, it permeates us, we waltz through it daily, we take it for granted because, ultimately, it is granted to us.

No, we don't appreciate The Miracle because we're obsessed with our collection of what we think are the priorities in Life, and the luxuries that we manufacture for ourselves, and the scandals that we manufacture for ourselves, and the global crises that we manufacture for ourselves.

See, we're so shamelessly narcissistic that we imagine everything mighty and magnificent and glorious only exists for our amusement. We imagine that we can take it or leave it.

That's what distinguishes us from the other creatures of this world. This is what got us kicked out of Eden, right? We were banished from living in harmony with Nature because we aspired to perceiving it as God perceives it. God knows how Nature works, he knows how it's put together — and when we acquired the awareness of God, we acquired an unnatural curiosity to take Nature apart. We have the same base impulses as animals, but we have the curiosity of God.

Which makes us unique. It makes us the ultimate misfits.

See, animals know that God exists, and animals are fully aware of the hierarchy of spirit. Animals are so tuned-in to the tremulous vibes that events in other dimensions affect them profoundly. We know that animals anticipate natural disasters, that's just a fact. But animal sensitivity extends beyond the physical world. Hundreds of birds of one species drop dead in flight, and they fall to earth. A shoal of fish of one species go belly up, dying simultaneously for no apparent reason. Happens all the time.

It's as if the Life force was just sucked out of them. But it's the precise selection of species that is the marvel — it's not as if some natural force is just blindly sucking the Life out of everything in the area. There's a surgical precision in these mini-extinction-events.

What is that? Science has no answer.

All Science can do is attempt to give us perspective. That's all.

When we think we've discovered something new and we think we know something new, what we've actually done is built a little model of that thing in our minds, and there it becomes an object of admiration and pride, because we think we understand that model. We have now drawn that model within our perspective of reality.

When we present our discovery to others for their approval, they hold it at arm's length and turn it over and scrutinize it from every angle, and they KNOW that model exists, because their minds comprehend the same details we comprehend.

So, we agree on Reality. Therefore, the model is "real" and it becomes a working bit of our knowledge base.

The Miraculous, however, cannot be reduced to a model that we can understand or manipulate or place in a museum display case. The Miraculous defies Nature, just as WE defy Nature. That's why we suspect that The Miraculous is the result of intelligent interference. That's why The Miraculous implies God.

That's why Science detests The Miraculous. The Miraculous refuses to be measured, it refuses to cooperate with our four-dimensional models of Reality.

You know, one of the greatest men I knew many years ago was a magician. Not a sorcerer or anything like that, but a stage magician, a sleight of hand artist, a practitioner of theatrical magic, which certainly can be explained in four-dimensional terms. He not only performed magic, he collected all sorts of magic tricks — thousands of tricks, some very ancient and some very modern, but all predicated on the fact that human attention can be reliably misled.

One night after enjoying dinner in his home, this magician offered to reveal to me the secret of any one magic trick I chose. This was a marvelous gift, but I was at a loss to choose one magic trick from among the many I had seen him perform in the past. Finally, I said, "How do you pierce a balloon with a knitting needle without popping the balloon?"

This one trick had always baffled me from a physics standpoint. The magician produces a latex balloon, inflates it, ties it off, and then drives a foot-long knitting needle right through the balloon as easily as inserting it through a melon. The balloon remains intact. The trick is so simple and so in-your-face, your brain immediately goes into high gear trying to solve it.

How do you stick ANYTHING through a balloon without popping it?

He chuckled at my simple inquiry, because I could have asked him about ANY trick. I mean, I could have asked about Houdini's Metamorphosis and it would have been revealed to me that night. But I wasn't interested in the Metamorphosis, which is more a feat of timing than anything else. I was interested in the straight-up physical impossibility of a knitting needle stabbed through a balloon.

The magician stepped to his cabinet, withdrew the necessary props, and rejoined me at the table. He laid out the objects for me to see and said, "the secret is right in front of you." There was a balloon and a glinting knitting needle upon a red silk kerchief. I picked up each of the items and inspected them carefully. They were unremarkable, except that the silk kerchief felt a little greasy.

"That's the secret," the magician smiled. A red silk kerchief, which already has a pleasing sheen to the naked eye, is the vehicle for a small quantity of machine grease worked into the fabric. The knitting needle is dramatically unwrapped from the greased kerchief, and with very graceful handling, the needle is coated all the way to the tip with a film of grease.

The knitting needle is then plunged right through the balloon, in one side and out the other, and the grease serves to seal the puncture, so no air escapes, explosively or otherwise.

Simple physics. It was a middle-school physics experiment. I felt incredibly stupid, but also enlightened.

See, Magic is REAL in its performance, the EFFECT it has on the audience is REAL. How very wonderful to be able to impart that feeling of awe and wonder to hundreds and thousands and millions of people simply by making a few simple physical preparations and presenting the EFFECT as Magic.

This is one reason I've always preferred to work in the background, participating in elaborate preparations that culminate in simple and straightforward presentations. It's like the magic of the theatre, right? Behind the various curtains and backdrops, there's a veritable mob of people hurrying to and fro, moving property here and there, adjusting lighting and sound and effects, all to create an illusion of a moment in time out there on the stage.

I've always enjoyed being the man behind the curtain.

But in the cases of select species of animals just dropping dead en masse, or of fish and crabs and frogs and all sorts of unlikely things miraculously falling out of the sky (and in absence of convenient meteorological explanations), I think there are elaborate preparations going on in other dimensions, a lot of covert stagecraft behind the miraculous events we see in the world around us.

Am I saying that miraculous events are faked? Oh, no, they may surely answer every criteria of our most stringent inquiry. I'm saying that what we perceive as miracles in our Universe are actually fairly mundane interdimensional events; but, when they intrude into our Universe, and we see only, perhaps, three or four facets of an extraordinarily multifaceted event, we simply have no faculty to grasp or comprehend the true nature of what has transpired.

Look at the Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, in Portugal, 1917.

It was foretold, and some 100,000 people were on hand to witness the Miraculous events, among them scientists and journalists and photographers. Yes, it happened. That it happened isn't in question. But WHAT happened, truly?

How could the SUN apparently move closer to the Earth, such that witnesses saw the disc grow larger and felt the temperature increase accordingly?

Pardon, but if the Sun was jostled around like that, even for a few seconds, it would produce gravity waves that would still be reverberating around this arm of the galaxy. The known planets would leave their orbits, go sailing off into the void like ghost ships, or assume new, strange, elliptical orbits. The Asteroid and Kuiper Belts would be affected, and great slabs of rock and ice would come tumbling into the inner Solar System. Who knows what else would result from the Sun playing hopscotch around the solar system?

Well, then, it was the EARTH that moved closer to the Sun, right?

Again, impossible. We're talking about taking a binary planet system (Earth/Moon is a binary planet system) off of its orbit and plunging it toward the Sun at the center of the Solar System. Obviously, that didn't happen. The velocities involved would strip away Earth's atmosphere in seconds, the tidal forces would launch the oceans out of their basins and into space, where they would turn into an icy, comet-like tail swirling away for millions of miles.

Ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Using Occam's Razor, we can very quickly eliminate the possibility that the Earth or Sun deviated in their exquisitely-balanced cosmic gyrations, and we arrive at the much more simple and energy-efficient explanation that 100,000 witnesses (scientists and journalists inclusive) had their PERCEPTION influenced by an external source.

A cosmic magic trick. Sleight of hand on a titanic scale. A Miracle.

Something punched through from another dimension and 100,000 four-dimensional brains tried to make sense of it. Oh, there was definitely a physical effect, no question. They captured images of the Miracle of the Sun.

But what really transpired there?

Naysayers will tell you that these throngs of people assembled over an area of 18 miles in Portugal's countryside and stared at the sun until their brains were fried and they started hallucinating.

O my Lord, thou hast set the Sun spinning in the heavens, casting every colour upon the land, and the zig and the zag thing, as thou wouldst, as we cower, yes, the mighty Sun doest make the wet bits dry, in thy mercy! Lo!

Occam's Razor works on naysayers, too.

No, something happened. It was captured on film and in thousands of witness accounts. Wet clothing was instantly dried. Wet, muddy earth was made dry in ten minutes. Moisture, it seems, was drawn away at the event horizon.

No trees burst into flame, thankfully. But you can imagine the frenzy of the crowds as SOMETHING increased the outdoor temperature sufficiently to dehydrate rain-drenched clothing and muddy earth?

In ten minutes?

Well... If I may observe. What do we know that would split sunlight into its spectra, sending flashes of every color? A prism? I've played with glass lenses that were crafted to filter light into myriad colors. The disc of the Sun was also seen to move about erratically in the sky, and seemed to come closer to the Earth than normal.

Somebody playing with a cosmic magnifying lens, maybe?

Why not? If someone wanted to make an impression on 100,000 people in the Portuguese countryside, I think a display of focusing the Sun's rays on the Earth through a tremendous lens (positioned in Space, of course) would scare the living shit out of anyone. Even hardened skeptics and atheists.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic.

I think that something extraordinary transpired on that day in Portugal, and I think its explanation is as incredible as its effect. Some agency unknown to Man positioned a lens of some sort near the Earth so as to create a solar spectacle, complete with prismatic displays of color, as well as an increase in temperature sufficient to evaporate a great quantity of rainwater in a matter of minutes.

Like a boy playing with a magnifying glass, roasting the frantic population of an anthill.

Like that, but not precisely so. The Miracle of the Sun was foretold, not in exact terms, but the Virgin advised that something was going to happen. So it was a controlled event. No one was roasted alive, and no trees burst into flame, but wet clothing and soggy earth were dried, which indicates very precise control of the effect.

The Magician was quite careful not to injure his audience. The Miracle of Fatima was a demonstration of power, yes? Power and Control on a scale that dwarfs Mankind's best efforts to insignificance. I mean, we couldn't replicate the Miracle of the Sun if we wanted to.

The best magicians in the world can deceive an audience at close range, but when it comes to creating a spectacle with intense radiant heat over an area of 18 miles, and visible to an audience of a hundred thousand spread out across the countryside, I defy the best magicians in the world to replicate the effect.

I defy them.

The engineering and orchestration of such an event is Miraculous; even in its explanation it's Miraculous. It would require the technology of an extremely advanced civilization, far beyond our current capability to harness and focus energies in that way. For all practical purposes, it would require a God.

But... What if there was an advanced civilization capable of pulling off this magic trick? From where? From the Pleiades? Oh, please.

I'm not going to leap immediately to extraterrestrial explanations, okay, because I don't think that's necessary. There's plenty of terrain to support a number of civilizations on this planet. We just happen to occupy the outermost layer of its rocky crust.

Yeah, I do seriously think that there's another civilization that coexists with us on this planet. A civilization several million years more technically advanced than us, and it is located about 20 miles straight down.

No, the Earth isn't hollow. But there is a sweet spot about 20 miles below the surface where a sufficiently sophisticated species could carve out a place for itself. Indeed, an intelligent species would know that you can survive virtually unscathed for billions of years deep below the surface of a rocky planet covered with water.

That would be a species that flies in and out of the oceans and atmosphere as easily as stepping out the front door and onto the porch.

They own the planet, of course. They've always owned it. And, yes, they're entirely capable of engineering and orchestrating a Miracle of Fatima to keep our species moving in a desired direction. Whatever direction that is. A direction that pleases them, perhaps, or that serves them.

Certainly, if there is one subterranean civilization there can be two subterranean civilizations. In fact, if you have one extremely advanced civilization, it IS going to SPLIT after a few million or billion years. There is going to be schism in any intelligent community. Fact of life (and another story). Intelligent communities split, they divide, and divide again.

So, I think there's TWO subterranean civilizations on Earth. At least.

The purpose of this blog — and of many of my original compositions over the last twenty years — is to make scientific and political and philosophical observations more accessible and comprehensible to the general public. Alas, the mandatory public school system in the West (and particularly in the USA) has utterly failed to prepare our population for deep and clear thinking; indeed, after 12 long years in the public schooling system, the overwhelming majority of students are permitted to graduate in abject illiteracy and ignorance of the world around them. After wasting so much of their young lives in public schools, these "graduates" enter the job market unqualified to flip a hamburger, much less make intelligent observations on and responsible decisions in their world. My ultimate objective is to elevate their curiosity, to expand their grammar and vocabularies somewhat, and to leave them with higher thoughts in their minds than the indoctrination provided by public schools and the crap provided by edutainment television. Thanks for your comments.

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About Zesko Whirligan

Zesko Whirligan — An interpreter, a middle-man, a minister plenipotentiary and a clairvoyant, Zesko Whirligan is a transitional enigma, by his own admission. Wherefrom his torrent of intelligence originates is a profound mystery, but his vision of the future is unfolding before you.